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Development for Steel Assault is inspired by retro and arcade style action games. The art takes inspiration from late NES games like Shatterhand and Batman, the music is being composed in software that produces actual NES music (as in, the music will be playable on an NES), and one of their backer rewards is going to be an NES rom with all their backers' names in it. But the developers state that they are "not trying to sell you some tired rhetoric about 'the good old days'. [They] just want to make a kickass 2D action game."

The two-man team behind Steel Assault has quite a bit of detail in their Kickstarter pitch, including information about the stages, which will all be strung together, and a detailed internal style guide. Players will only have one life and there will be multiple levels of difficulty, with the game being designed around the hardest difficulty and tuned down for the lower difficulty levels. There are also some example music tracks in the Kickstarter pitch. They intend for a perfect playthrough to take about half an hour, but want achieving perfect play to take hours of practice.

At time of this writing, their Kickstarter project has raised a little over $1,000 of their $8,000 goal with 29 days to go. They're only guaranteeing the game will be available for Windows, but are using cross-platform code libraries and would like to expand to Mac and Linux. They also have a Steam Greenlight campaign running.